Hot water anyone?

Ahh the joys of being a home owner. A few weeks ago now, the lights in our master bathroom, bedroom and front hall way stopped working. It was very strange because the outlets still had power and so did the rest of the house. Phil checked the breaker and it was tripped so he fixed it and that seemed to do the trick (at least for a short time).

The next day the lights were back off. He checked the electrical box again and determined that we had a bad breaker and it needed to be replaced. Upon replacing this so called “bad breaker” he noticed it had a small burn spot on the side of it. But with the new breaker in place the lights were back in order.

While Phil was fixing the lights, I was giving the girls a bath before bed. I happened to notice that our once “scald your skin off” hot water was now luke warm. I mentioned this little tidbit to Phil (and by mentioned I mean screamed it from the bathroom while getting water splashed all over me by Natalie). He was literally in the process of closing the electrical box door to complete the first fiasco when this lovely fact came to our attention. He did some investigating and realized that our trusty water heater was no longer working. (We will later discover that the water heater somehow short circuited in the electrical box, causing the breaker for the lights in our bedroom to overheat).

Since the water heater was from circa 1983, we decided it was probably time for a new one anyways and we were actually very lucky since the heating element just stopped working and it did not burst water all over our basement. Since we were doing the job, we decided to do it right and purchased an instant/tankless water heater. That was just the beginning of our troubles.

1 Propane Tankless Water Heater
6 Trips to the store
1 Conversion (from electric to propane)
1 Adapter kit (from LP to propane) shipped from California
5 nights of work by Phil, our friend Jon & Jon’s dad
4 baths with water heated on the stove
3 showers at my parents house
and a week without hot water

Priceless – or memorable anyway

We did survive with a little bit of creativity and a LOT of help from our friends. We now have a functioning instant water heater and will never take hot water for granted again!